Hocus Focus

June 1, 2004
Gr 1-3-In the first title, Ellie and her mother temporarily move from Oregon to a California town that celebrates the migration of the monarch butterflies during the winter months. The students in her fourth-grade class contact relatives and acquaintances who live farther north to track the insects' progress and Ellie e-mails a friend in Oregon to help out. The cheery narrative culminates with the town's Monarch Festival and the arrival of the beautiful creatures. Lots of facts are presented in small sidebars. Information gathering, e-mail, and map usage are the methods of learning stressed in the narrative. Hocus Focus tells the story of a boy who resists wearing glasses. Unfamiliar words are defined in boxed insets and diagrams of lenses and the eye are included. Children will have fun with the small eye chart that is appended. Both titles are illustrated with bright, appealing artwork that features characters from different ethnic backgrounds and adds detail to both the plot and the information. Solid combinations of story and science.-Erlene Bishop Killeen, Fox Prairie Elementary School, Stoughton, WI

Copyright 2004 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2004
Gr. 2-3. Though his doctor has prescribed glasses, nearsighted Jack decides not to wear them in school after Hank calls him "Four Eyes." Instead, Jack teams up with Gina, a farsighted classmate, who has also been dissuaded from wearing her glasses by Hank's taunts. Their cooperative plan to see both near and far works pretty well until their class goes on a geology fieldtrip, where their poor vision puts Gina in a dangerous predicament. In a comic twist, they both arrive at school the next morning wearing glasses to find an uncommonly friendly Hank wearing braces. Along with the simple story and colorful, cartoon-style illustrations, this paperback from the Science Solves It series delivers some useful facts about eyesight and common vision problems. The last page, "Think Like a Scientist," points out how scientists work, then draws parallels to the story and provides a vision-testing activity.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2004, American Library Association.)